The Most Important Way to Love and Peace Is Justice

A Conversation with Samar Yazbek.

- Stephanie Papa

In March 2011, after peaceful protests began to emerge across Syria, pushing for government reform, Samar Yazbek witnessed what was a passive, civil uprising become an unthinkable war. Fearing for her safety as a journalist, Yazbek fled to Paris, where she’s lived in exile ever since. She made the perilous crossing into Syria from the Turkish border three times, until 2013, which marked the last time she saw her country. Interviewing the locals in the heart of the most ravaged areas of Syria, Yazbek was compelled to gather the people’s stories, from mothers of martyrs to secular fighters. The voices of these men and women, who are fighting for their freedom and lives every day under the attacks from the regime and radical occupation, would not have been heard without Yazbek’s efforts to collect them. It wasn’t until 2014, after struggling to process the brutality she’d witnessed, that she was able to put it to paper. The result is The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria, which has been called one of the first political classics of the twenty-first century.

This interview took place in May 2016 in a café in Paris. I spotted Yazbek, who was waiting outside with a cigarette, under a floppy black hat. After our interview, she asked in Arabic to hear the story of our interpreter, who, like Yazbek, has witnessed the Syrian conflict with her own eyes. Although Yazbek is cautious about spilling too much personal information, in many ways she reflected the women in her book: humble, clear, and open.

Stephanie Papa: Could you tell us what your life was like in Syria, before the revolution broke out?

Samar Yazbek: Before the uprising began, I was a writer and journalist. I wrote scripts for TV and cinema; I worked for local magazines. I was a women’s rights activist, and still am.